What I mean by `bi'

`Bi', short for `bisexual', means (roughly) capable of having
romantic or sexual feelings for members of both sexes.

Bi people come in lots of different flavours. (Personally, I prefer
mint. :-) Some bi folk don't really care about gender - they
feel like they're attracted to people just as people, rather than
particularly as men or women (or some other gender). Some bi
folk are very conscious of the gender of the people they're attracted
to - they
do care about gender, they just can be attracted to members of
both genders.

I'm not sure where I fall on this spectrum; I certainly react
differently to men and women in social situations, but I think
a lot of that has to do my expectations about different ways men
and women are socialised to behave. In general I think that
what I'm attracted to about people doesn't have much to do with
biological sex.

Although there are behaviours associated with being bi, it's kind
of a fuzzy definition. There are people who love or have sex
with members of their own sex who identify as straight, and there
are people who love or have sex with members of another sex who
identify as lesbian or gay. And of course there are celibate
people who identify as bi.

Bisexuality and monogamy

Bisexuality and monogamy are not incompatible; I know lots of
monogamous bi people. I also know poly bi people. And once
I met a couple of bi people who called themselves `gender-monogamous'
- they only had one male and one female partner, and the four
people involved where in a stable long-term relationship.

(Monogamy and
this particular bisexual, however, are not compatible. :-)

For more information

If your site gets it, you can check out the
soc.bi newsgroup, which has a periodic FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions
list) about bisexuality.

BISEXU-L is a LISTSERV mailing list about bisexuality. It's fairly
high-volume and has a lot of social fluff as well as discussion
of issues (not that I think this is necessarily a bad thing, mind
you!) To subscribe, send an email message to
listserv@brownvm.brown.edu containing the single line ``SUBSCRIBE BISEXU-L Jane Doe'', replacing
Jane Doe with your (real, not login) name.

For information on Boston-area bi events (such as the bi brunches),
you can subscribe to the
biversity mailing list by sending a request to
<biversity-request@blank.org>. The
Bisexual Resource Center in Boston can also be reached by phone at 617/338-9595 and
by email at
<brc@biresource.org>; when no one's staffing the phone, they have an answering machine
message with times and places of current events.